March 10th, 2011
Program notes for Recital Program, Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, La Jolla, California
Irish-born poet Thomas Moore, born 1779, wrote many poems to Irish tunes, including the enormously popular Last Rose of Summer. This song was possibly the best-known song in America early in the 19th century. Mendelssohn’s Fantaisie from 1833 is an emotional operatic scena beginning with a simple statement of the original melody followed by a virtuosic agitated response interspersed with fragments from the melody in a central recitative. The work concludes with a touching reworking and expansion of the original.
Possibly the best known of Mendelssohn’s many solo piano works, the Rondo Capriccioso exemplifies the composer’s gifts for the graceful, elegant scherzo movement. It is reminiscent of similar pieces from Midsummer Night’s Dream and the String Octet.
Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Late Summer Nights is a wonderfully unified set of five pieces. Related by key, metrical unity and recurring use of melodic and motivic fragments throughout, a unity is created. One can create an overall scenario, based on the title, or hear each piece as an exploration of an abstract musical idea with emotional content, akin to the Brahms character pieces.
Ferruccio Busoni is best remembered as a titan of the piano, a Late Romantic whose transcriptions for piano of Bach’s works are unsurpassed in that genre. Yet, in his writing and experimentation as a composer he pointed the way to music’s future. Among other ideas, he proposed microtonal division of the 12-tone chromatic scale. Another idea, less radical, was redistribution of the 7-note diatonic scale, creating 113 different scales within the 12-note octave. This pre-dates by nearly 15 years Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic method. The Sonatina Seconda (1912) is specified ‘senza tonalita’ by the composer because traditional harmonic hierarchy is abandoned. The occasional “harmonic” chord is quickly displaced by chromatic voice progression. The line between major-minor is also blurred. Busoni uses motivic chromatic groups of major and minor thirds as well as chromatic scales throughout the work.
During much of the Middle Ages Sweden was an imperial force wielding great power and influence in much of Northern and Eastern Europe including the Baltic States and Poland. At the end of the 16th century the crowns of Sweden and Poland were united for a brief period. From this region Sweden took what became the polska back home, developing it into one of its most identifiable folk music idioms, the fiddle tune. The polska, in 3/4 meter, is not related to the polka, which is a dance in 2/4 from Bohemia, and of much later development. It is more closely related to the mazurka.
Dag Lundin is a prolific and respected composer in Sweden today writing for symphonic, chamber and vocal ensembles. The first of this group was originally from Estonia. The second tune is originally by Swedish fiddler Roligs Per. Next, and not a polska, is a melody played on animal horn to call the cattle home at night. The last of this set is a fiddle tune from a region of southwest Sweden.
All the transcriptions are by Dag Lundin.
Rachmaninoff is deemed by many to be the greatest of the late Romantic composers for piano. But the advent of modern musical idioms during his career caused much of his music to be considered old-fashioned by his critics. A complex contrapuntal style typical of late Romanticism is infused with a melodic and emotional intensity. These five preludes may be less familiar than the famous C# Minor, Op. 3, and G Minor, Op. 23, yet each is rich with musical ideas which could have been developed into a significantly larger work.